Monday, February 13, 2012 8:23 pm

Burn in hell, Edward Egan …

CT Magazine: In 2002, you wrote a letter to parishioners in which you said, “If in hindsight we discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

EGAN: First of all, I should never have said that. I did say if we did anything wrong, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we did anything wrong. But I hate to go back over this. I think there’s more to life than that one issue, especially when I had no cases.

Jesus wept. Literally. There is so much wrong with these four sentences from Egan, this one short paragraph, that I’m surprised the very pixels on my monitor haven’t burst in outrage.

First of all, his “apology” was a nonapology (“If we discover that mistakes may have been made …”). By that time, as then-Bishop Egan then knew, many such mistakes had been thoroughly documented and already in the public record.

Now he says he shouldn’t even have said that much? The mind. It boggles.

And the reason he says that is that he doesn’t think the diocese and archdiocese did anything wrong. Never mind what the independent experience of victims, their families, law enforcement and social workers found. It’s what he thinks that gets to determine what goes into the history books.

And he hates to go back over it. Awwwww, poor widdle factotum, he hates to go back over this. Does he not understand that the victims are forced to go back over it, every single day of their lives? Does he not understand the devastation that sexual abuse wreaks upon the soul of a child — devastation that many, despite the best care, never get over?

I guess that has to be a rhetorical question, because then he says, “I think there’s more to life than that one issue, especially when I had no cases.”

Because it’s all about you, isn’t it, you narcissistic turdwaffle? Sure, there’s more to life, but in the lives of the victims, the pain, shame, humiliation, guilt, self-recrimination and second-guessing are the issue of life, every day, forever. But the fact that you “had no cases” — which, frankly, I don’t think is fact at all; I think it’s bullshit — somehow trumps what the victims went through and, in some cases, their further victimization, through intimidation or blackmail, by a church desperate to keep its skirts clean, its donations flowing and the moral rot at its heart somehow, in Bizarro World, consonant with its professed principles.

And these are the people claiming the moral authority to decide whether women who aren’t even Catholic can get their contraception covered by health insurance.